Wesleyan University

Digitalizing Historical Consciousness

Author(s): Claudio Fogu
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 48, No. 2, Theme Issue 47: Historical Representation and
Historical Truth (May, 2009), pp. 103-121
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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History and Theory, Theme Issue 47 (May 2009), 103-121 ? Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656

DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS

CLAUDIO FOGU

ABSTRACT

What is a "historical" video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this

question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear-narrative
cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital
media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view
of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of
the historiographical operation, from the establishment of digital archives, to the produc
tion of e-texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen
from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization
and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to
detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real?"what

essentially happened"?that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth

century. Second,
they also challenge the semiotic production of "historic events" that has characterized the
construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words,

replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing
the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and his
toric events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence.
Although digital
reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of
the signifier, history?nor does this essay propose one?I do argue that the impact of video

games on our contemporary historic(al) culture is of paradigmatic similar to

proportions
those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one
of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier's Civilization, I show how
the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de-tempo
ralization and de-referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the
historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm:
history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible.

Keywords: historical consciousness, video games, digital technology, Sid Meier's Civiliza
tion, 9/11 Digital Archive

I. INTRODUCTION:
HOLOCAUSTII. SURVIVOR

Welcome to what the New York Times calls the "final solution" in history video
games. You can choose among five modes of real identities, and
interactivity,
avatars. Play in Bystander mode, and you will be an ordinary German between
1935 and 1945 in the position of either helping Jews or contributing to their
downfall. Play in Shoah mode and you will be a "victim," a Jew (or
European
Communist, or Gypsy?other are under construction for Holocaust
categories
III) in 1929 Germany, and make decisions that might lead you and your fam

ily to salvation or destruction. Play in Sonderkommando mode and you will be

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 104 CLAUDIOFOGU

a camp inmate seeking to survive. Play in Final Solution mode and you will
be an SS officer on trial at Nuremberg (the only SS identities available in this
version) who may or may not have personally ordered the elimination of camp

inmates, but has to mount a defense of what he has or has not done. Play in

Coming to Terms with the Past mode and you can be the historian who will
assist the Nuremberg prosecutor in trying a perpetrator or the lawyer who will
defend him. Chosen your mode of historical interaction? Ready to play? Put on
your Holocaust II Virtual Reality Multi-Player Environment Gear and connect
to USC Shoah Foundation Institute click on the
(http://college.usc.edu/vhi/),
Holocaust II hyperlink and begin in Bystander mode. Or, connect to
playing
the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance (www.museumoftolerance.
com) to play in any of the other modes. Click on the Holocaust II portal, receive
a documented historical and . . .make
identity history.

Holocaust II does not exist as an actual video game, at least not to my knowl
edge, not at the time of my writing this essay. But I wanted to begin with a fic
tion of my trained imagination because after having spent months researching
video games, I have not been able to conceptualize the criteria by which one
can be distinguished from the others as being "historical," let alone which of
them would qualify as a "successful" example of historical representation in the

digital mode. My invention of Holocaust II is plausible in terms of the techno

logical state of digital environments today, but it responds to the conditions of a

historical imagination trained by the reading of written history and the analysis
of traditional forms of historical representation (monuments, museums, films).
It projects a digital-interactive fantasy that I consider successfully "historical"
insofar as it would probe the ethical-aesthetic limits of both literal and figural

representations of the Holocaust,1 and would respond to some key challenges

that video games pose to our "scholarly assumptions" and to modern historical
culture as a whole.2

Holocaust confirm, for example, Wulf Kansteiner's observation that

II would
the formation of collective memories or historical consciousness in the digital
age will differ dramatically in "thoroughly interactive cultural environment in
a
which individuals will no longer depend on centralized institutions ... to develop
their collective memories."3 Players of Holocaust II would construct their histori
cal consciousnesses from the interactive space of their private screens, the virtual
communities of avatars, and the "factual and counterfactual scenarios about the

history of World War II and the Nazi crimes" that the game would conjure up
for them.4 Another key aspect thatHolocaust II exemplifies is the challenge that
"virtual experiences" bring to the differentiation between "media experiences,
both interactive and linear, and real life experiences."5 As Kansteiner suggests,
who wants to shape collective memories of the future should . . . com
"anybody

1. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlander

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

2. Wulf Kansteiner, "Alternate Worlds and Invented Communities: History and Historical
Consciousness in the Age of Interactive Media," inManifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, S.

Morgan, and A. Munslow (London: Routledge, 2007), 131-148.

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 143.
5. Ibid., 141.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 105

pete for the privilege to build the monuments, museums, and historical media in
the virtual worlds" of video games.6 Integrating interactivity with the "real-life"
identities that the Tolerance Museum or the USC Shoah Foundation (formerly the
Visual History Foundation) would provide for any player entering the immersive
space of the video game, Holocaust II would surely provide virtual memories of
something perceived as real.
Yet even in such an interactive environment certain traits of linear historical
culture would be remediated and by no means disappear.7 Just as film and televi
sion remediated a number of literary and popular cultural forms of communica
tion, while not replacing altogether the influence that texts and transgenerational
communication had on the formation of collective memories, so interactive media
will not entirely supplant traditional institutional forms of historical conscious
ness. commemorations, monument and debates on
Anniversary inaugurations,

Hollywood still take place in the digital future as they do in the present,
epics will
and will provide counterweights to the virtual experiences of the historically real
afforded by video games. In fact, several scholars have pointed out that the digital
might be no "revolution" at all, but just one more process of remediation.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that like all media revolutions
before it, digital media remediate other media in search of newer and greater
ways to create hence video reliance on the
"immediacy,"8 games' perspective,
cinematic language of editing, and, more generally, the immersive experience
a narrative book when as a "window" onto a world.9 Yet
generated by perceived
in oneimportant respect digital media differ decisively from traditional linear
media. In contrast to their predecessors, digital media achieve immediacy via
hypermediacy. Their ability to make us forget the medium, and thus achieve an
immersive effect of presence (immediacy), depends on their mimicking the logic
of a in which media are ever and we are used to their as
reality present presence

part of our reality. This paradoxical relationship between immediacy and hyper
mediacy may be the most striking trait of the age of digital interactivity, and it
goes a long way toward explaining why certain early forms of digital immediacy,
like virtual reality helmets and gloves, have all but disappeared notwithstand

ing their early promise of changing all aspects of visual culture. Virtual reality
apparatuses provided immediacy without hypermediacy, and therefore produced
a sensory of the real, but not as immersive an as the one
experience experience
afforded even by the most primitive video games such as Pong, which remedi
ated the perpendicular shot from the top of an arena or aerial balloon, typical of
television coverage of sports events.10

On the other
hand, between the dialectic
immediacy and hypermediacy
also operates in the other direction, that is, traditional media also remediate in
response to the challenge of newer technologies and modes of immediacy. In this

6. Ibid., 144.
7. Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media MA:
(Cambridge,
MIT Press,
2000).
8. Ibid., 96.
9. Ibid.
W.Ibid., 161.

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 106 CLAUDIO FOGU

respect, Bolter and Grusin suggest a first important corrective to the direction
that research should take in exploring the impact of digital technology on con
temporary and future historical culture. Although video games represent themost
sophisticated and popular form of interactive remediation, one cannot analyze
them in isolation from the impact that digital technology is having on the whole
field of historical production, from archives to textual and visual representations
of history. This essay will therefore take a more technological rather than media
centered approach, extending Kansteiner's analysis to forms of digital encroach
ment upon traditional media in order to explore how they relate to the fully
interactivecharacteristics of video games. Yet in doing so, this essay will also
attempt to address the major question raised by Kansteiner: how do interactive
media affect our conceptualization of historical consciousness itself?
As my video game fantasy exemplifies, the answer to this question is particu

larly difficult, because as historians and theorists of history belonging to the last
pre-interactive generation, both our historical imagination and our conceptual
frameworks have been constructed in response to linear media. Thus, when I
invented Holocaust II, I imagined it precisely according to basic assumptions
that are not formed in response to interactive media. In the first place, I took for
granted that historical consciousness is related to collective memory?hence the
choice of a historic event such as the Holocaust. Second, I hung my definition
of "historical" on the game's reference to a documentable "real" in the past, pro
vided inmy fantasy by the link to digital archival institutions such as the Simon
Wiesenthal Center and the USC Shoah Foundation. Both of these assumptions
represent the foci around which have rotated most debates in the past few decades
among historians and philosophers of history, defenders of traditional historical
epistemology, and their postmodern and poststructuralist critics. And yet, as Kan
steiner suggests in the last part of his essay, it is entirely possible that "interactive
media" us to focus "on the terms of the definition of historical
oblige precisely
consciousness that have been taken for granted."11 For Kansteiner, these
largely
terms consist in our notions of "communication, community, collective," and

ultimately "identity," all radically modified by the building up of interactive com

munities of avatars playing history online. But the challenge might extend even
further to the heart of historical semantics. Digital technology may have already
produced a reconfiguration of what we mean by "historical" in the first place.

II.HISTORYAS VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

To date, the impact of the digital on the practices of professional historians

seems to have been both uncontroversial and welcome. H-Net can be likened to
a perpetual annual conference, with everything from plenary speeches to intense

private conversations. Robert Darnton's authoritative push for e-books has raised
the awareness among historians that hypertext offers them possibilities for non
linear and forms of narrative.12 No wonder then that some historians
"layered"

11. I anticipated this challenge in my homage to the seriality of postmodern tem

fantasy, paying
porality by imagining Holocaust II to be already part of a series.
12. Go to http://www.historians.org/PRIZES/gutenberg/rdarnton2.cfm (accessed July 25, 2008).

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 107

may even be enthusiastic about this aspect of digitalization. As Edward L. Ayers

puts it, "history may be better suited to digital technology than any other human
istic discipline."13 This is so, in the first place, because "the hypertextuality of
digital texts allows for a multiplicity of semantic connections among data," and
hence the opportunity to "move toward more complex forms of analysis," but
also because it offers innovative ways to reconfigure narrative along nonlinear
For example, Ayers suggests, historians can use as
paths.14 "maps organizing
structures, as into the narrative, rather than mere illustrations" and
portals thereby
fulfillthe call to update their narrative strategies that the likes of Hayden White
have been advocating for decades, without necessarily falling into the still threat
ening mode of literary fiction.15 In fact, Ayers muses, the digital offers historians
the possibility of exchanging their control on "representation" for the freedom of
"interactivity" and the levitating effect of "immersion" typical of video games.16
Historians, however, do not seem to have taken the bait, at least not yet. Digital
history-telling a la Age of Empires or Gettysburg! has not made any inroads in
the historical profession, and the number of e-books published by the American
Historical Association is still less than one hundred. This, of course, is because of
several factors, not the least being the value given to e-publications inmerit and
tenure reviews. Yet there seems to be a significant imbalance between the slow
and half-hearted embrace of the narrative potential of hypertext and the unquali
fied enthusiasm for the digitalization of archival sources. The latter is by far the
most welcome and most extensive sign of digitalization in historiography.17
Although only twelve percent of the world's population is estimated to have
access to the web, digital archives have made archival research more accessible
to non-professional users. On the one hand, the advent of digital technologies has
been decisive both in increasing exponentially the number of people who perform
archival research, and in providing them with the option to augment online archival
sources through the submission of personally selected items. On the other hand,
the ready accessibility of archival material online has necessarily affected the ways
in which knowledge is produced, assimilated, organized, and exchanged by his
torians.18 In particular, according to Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz, digitalization
has begun to foster among historians "a greater sense that in [their] daily practices,
[they] are from a and has also "a critical re-evalua
performing script," prompted

13. Edward L. Ayers, "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,"http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/

PastsFutures.html, quotations on pages 1 and 6 (accessed July 25, 2008).
14. Ibid., 3.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. Ibid., 6.
17. Among the most prominent are The Virginia Center for
Digital History http://www.vcdh.
virginia.edu/index.php?page=VCDH, and The Center for History and New Media, at George Mason
University Washington DC, http://chnm.gmu.edu/ (both accessed July 25, 2008).
18. According to a recent dissertation on the topic, "Overall, digital have defined
technologies
the twenty-first century archive in several ways.
They have: 1) raised new preservation challenges;
2) augmented the volume of collected records; 3) given added privilege to the nature of the search
engine itself and its selection parameters; 4) increased outreach; 5) eased the process of professional
archival research; 6) improved the practice of photographic restoration; and 7) allowed the integra
tion of localized forms of knowledge." Lucia Ricciardelli, "Visual Culture and the Crisis of History:
American Documentary Practice in the Postmodern Era" (Ph.D. dissertation, of California,
University
Santa Barbara, December 2007), 48.

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 108 CLAUDIO FOGU

tion of the scripts [they] are performing."19 This way, digitalization can be seen as
realizing at last the democratic potential of American historiography expressed by
Carl Becker in his famous dictum that "Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and
sooner or later we must our to his necessities."20 Furthermore,
adapt knowledge

digitalization has achieved democratization by simultaneously domesticating post

modernism into a of consciousness."21
pragmatics "performance
This being the case, there is a deeper dimension to this process of "democrati
zation" best revealed by the September 11 Digital Archive.22 This archive realizes
the democratic mission of digitalization by consisting exclusively of document
files uploaded by Everymen and Everywomen. Accordingly, one can even find
a minority of "conspiracy theory" emails and statements among its thousands of
collected emails, videos, images, and audio files.23 A specific mark of its "popular"
nature can be found in the collection of documents called "'Satan in the Smoke'
emails," which received a specific heading in the "browse" section of the archive.24
The democratic ethos is pushed to the forefront by the minimalist approach to
archivization adopted by its organizers: the uploaded files are organized according
to theirmedium (e-mails, audio-video, stories, images, and so on) and no "subject"
catalogue directs the visitor toward any particular interpretive framework. Signifi
cantly, the "Satan in the Smoke" collection was not selected or labeled by the archi
vists, but donated and uploaded by a single user, and it appears under the browse
heading "emails." So in what sense does the archive fulfill its stated mission "to
collect, preserve and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath"?
What does "history" mean in this context? Surely not the exploration of historical
causes or for the event universally named nine-eleven, of which there
explanations
is no trace anywhere on the site. Nor even the utilization of the uploaded material
to produce multilayered narratives and interpretations of its experience. In fact,
according to its director, Tom Scheinfeldt, the archive is specifically prohibited by
statute from users to construct creative narratives of the sort envisioned
allowing

by Ayers.25 The September 11 Digital Archive thus seems to equate history with
experience rather than action, and to witnessing rather than making. In so doing, it
alerts us to?and in?a momentous process of re-semanticization of the
partakes
modern notion of "history" itself.
As Reinhart Koselleck has long pointed out, the birth of the modern (Western)
conception of history can be dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century,

19. Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, "Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern)

Theory to (Archival) Performance," Archival Science 2 (2002), 184.

20. Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian," American Historical Review 37 (Jan., 1932),
234.
21. Cook and Schwartz, "Archives, Records, and Power," 184.
22. http://911digitalarchive.org/index.php (accessed July 25, 2008).
23. The Archive contains more than 150,000 digital items, a tally that includes more than 40,000
emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than

15,000 digital images. In September 2003, the Library of Congress accepted the Archive into its col

lections, an event that both ensured the Archive's long-term preservation and marked the library's
first major digital acquisition.
24. http://91 ldigitalarchive.org/gallery_index.php (accessed July 25, 2008).
25. Phone conversation with Tom Scheinfeldt, the Archive's Director, available at http://www.

foundhistory.org/claudio.mp3 (accessed July 25, 2008).

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 109

when a process of "transcendentalization," and "sin

three-part "temporization,"

gularization" led to the notion of capital-H "History" (the ensemble of all human
actions in time), the semantic collapse of "history" with "the past," and the open
of Western consciousness to a "linear" and "progressive" view of historical
ing
time.26 This process also involved the transfiguration of the ancient conception
of history as a trans-temporal reservoir of moral lessons (historia magistra vitae)
into the idea of "historic eventfulness" masterfully captured by Kant in 1792, in
The Contest of Faculties.21 Here, Kant argued that the French Revolution was
no mere historical fact or process but a "signum" (demonstrativum, rememerati

vum, et prognostikon) that demonstrated retroactively and for all future time the
transcendental and progressive nature of the historical process. Thus Kant gave
philosophical articulation to the idea of "historic-ness," discursively associated
with "speech," "site," and "event." It projected the "historic event" out of the

realm of the real and into the semiotic realm of our consciousness as a
"sign"
that simultaneously re-narrativizes the relationship between past and present, and

opens the latter toward a (new) future.28

Seen in this semantic context, the first salient aspect of a digital archive specifi
cally dedicated to the defining historic event of our times is that the main request
made by its visitors to the archivists was, from the beginning, to provide them
with "9/11 FAQs."29 Rather than signify the event, this popular request for pre
senting "facts," that is, answers to frequently asked questions, marks the distance
of our times from the origins of both the transcendental notion of the "histori
cal" and the immanent codification of "historic-ness." In fact, if we consider the
apotheosis of historic signification of 9/11 summarized in the Presidential mantra
on nine-eleven!" the archive's stress on "fact-ness," and its
"everything changed
staunch refusal to narrativize, and thus constitute the "Event" 9/11, could not be
more counter-historic.30 At the same time, it also contrasts with the
explicitly
traditional goal of archives to be the treasure chest of historical narratives with
its stated metahistorical purpose "of using these events as a way of assessing
how history is being recorded and preserved in the twenty-first century and as an
opportunity to develop free software tools to help historians to do a better job of
collecting, preserving, and writing history in the new century."31
The September 11 Digital Archive thus alerts us to a momentous
process of
re-semanticization taking place under the sign of the digital. On the one hand it
affirms the idea of history qua experience that reifies facts into "FAQs" as if they
were a footnote to what counts as historical, that is, the of onlookers
experience

26. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press), 21-38.
27. Immanuel Kant, The Contest of Faculties and Other Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 182; original emphasis.
28. Claudio Fogu, "Actualism and the Fascist Historic Imaginary," History and Theory 42 (2003),
196-221.
29. http://911digitalarchive.org/faqs.php (accessed July 25, 2008).
30. Tom Scheinfeldt: "We were contacted by the Sloan Foundation about submitting some kind of
a proposal to do something about 9/11 just after the attacks, in
September. We submitted our proposal
for a digital archive inOctober. Funding was awarded in December. And the Archive was launched
to the public in January 2002." Email dated March 6, 2008.
31. http://91 ldigitalarchive.org/about/index.php (accessed July 25, 2008).

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 110 CLAUDIO FOGU

qua experience. On the other, it brings forth a new notion of presence that is nei
ther immanent nor transcendental, but properly "virtual" because it calls attention
to the act of witnessing and its digital dissemination, rather than to the rhetorical
construction and perception of "real presence" in the act of representation. In so
doing, the archive also signals a profound transformation in the rhetorical code
that sustained the oscillation between the historical and the historic in the modern
historic(al) imagination.32

III.FROMREPRESENTATIONTO IMMERSIONIN
MECHANICAL REPRODUCTIONMEDIA

As the grammatical notion of the "historic present"?that is, the use of the present
tense instead of the past in historical narration?plainly reveals, the idea of his
toric-ness is rooted in the rhetorical construction of presence in narrative. In fact,
the genealogy of historic-ness takes us right back to the Greek rhetorical effect
of enargeia?literally "vividness" or "palpability"?achieved by great historians
like Thucydides when they described events from the perspective of a witness
to the event, thereby identifying the reader with that witness.33 Translated into
Latin as evidentia, the rhetorical link between the effect of presence and the sig
nification of historical truth found theological institutionalization in the Catholic

conception of representation built on the dogma of the Eucharist, which posited

the "real presence" of the body of Christ in the host. Thus codified, enargeia
evidentia sustained not only the "power of images" in the development of Chris
tian-Western culture, but also, and in particular, the codification of in
"presence"
all visual modes of historical representation.34 This dual trend has come to a key
point of conjunction with the invention of cinema.
From its inception, enargeia found its most powerful and congenial medium
in the early "cinema of attractions," with its taste for wonder and its production
of a of distant and simultaneous This early cinema
spectator-witness presents.35

exploited the sensory appeal of the image rather than the narrative realism afford
ed by editing. Soon, however, the aesthetic prerogatives of narrative asserted
themselves, the realism of the new medium toward a sub
pushing long-lasting
ordination to the law of literary genres.36 Characteristically, the remediation of
cinema along narrative-literary lines found privileged expression in the creation
of the genre of the historical feature film.37 At the same time this new genre also

32.1 discuss this oscillation with particular reference to fascist modes of historic(al) representation
in my The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2003).
33. Carlo Ginzburg, "Ekphrasis and Quotations," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 50 (1988), 4-22.
34. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and Fogu, The Historic Imaginary.
35. Lauren Rabinovitz, "More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through
Hale's Tours, IMAX, and Motion Simulation Rides," inMemory Bytes: History, Technology, and

Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and A. Geil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004),
102.
36. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Edinburgh Gate, UK: Pearson Education

Limited, 2006), 13.

A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical
37. Vivian Sobchack, '"Surge and Splendor':
Epic," Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 43.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 111

managed to give the witness-effect of enargeia its most powerful translation in

visual terms. By definition, the realism of all historical feature films?including
historical romances, epics, and period films?has come to rely upon the same

poetic rules of narrative construction upon which all feature films have come to
rely. The past is made "present" to the viewer-witness by means of historically
accurate and detailed mise-en-scene, continuity of action, eye-level point of view,

and continuous editing. Historical features, so to speak, push the screen toward
degree zero of visual representation in order to transform the viewer into a direct
witness of the action represented. In this sense the historical film genre as a whole
can be consideredboth the grave-digger and the Jonah's whale of the early cin
ema of attraction. Onthe one hand, its success in attracting the middle classes
to the new medium helped the two-hour-long story-like feature film become the
norm in cinema the world over. On the other, its continuous search for new ways
to effect a sense of presence kept alive the association between the new medium
and the search for a sensory stimulus that would bring the viewer into the space
of the representation. Nowhere is this dual process better exemplified than in the
characteristics and longevity of the Hollywood historic(al) epic.
"It is like writing history with lightning!" famously affirmed historian-Presi
dent Woodrow Wilson after viewing Birth of a Nation in a private White House
screening in 1914. "Lightning" here stood, and has continued to stand, for the
"expansive, even hysterical acts of cinema," associated with the
hyperbolic,
"spectacular possibilities" of the historical epic.38 As Vivian Sobchack explains,
"the Hollywood historical epic is not so much about the narrative accounting
of specific historical events as it is about the construction of general historic
. . . and
eventfulness, accomplished by creating equivalence reciprocity among
the epic 'historic' cinematic production, its historical narrative content and his
trionic form, and its 'historic' reception."39 In other words, the epic genre can be

credited with having merged and simultaneously amplified the spectacular effect
of wonder of the cinema of attraction with the narrative impulse of the Holly
wood feature film. Unsurprisingly, this merging has been greatly enhanced by
the development of digital technology. In fact, after a period of crisis and decline
between the late 1960s and mid 1980s, the genre has rebounded and returned to
its earlier splendor precisely thanks to the increasing malleability of the image
(for example, Schindler's List, 1993), the editing (JFK, 1991), and the mise-en
scene (Gladiator, 2000) made possible by digital manipulation.
The technological capability to produce digital reconstructions of past places
and events that seamlessly merge with analogic forms of representation without
disrupting the viewer's sense of verisimilitude has thus brought spectacle back
to the center of cinematic culture and the historical feature film. Yet unlike its
early forms based on the operatic overwhelming of the spectator's senses, digital
spectacle is put in the service of deconstructive strategies. In Forrest Gump and
JFK, for example?two of the earliest examples of digitally manipulated histori
cal features?digital technology was used for the first time to intentionally blur
the boundary between the historically real (that is, recorded) and the
historically
38. Ibid., 28.
39. Ibid., 28-32.

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 112 CLAUDIO FOGU

fictional. While neither of these films yielded a "pre-reflective" sense of "Being

in-History," which Sobchack associates with the epic film, they both projected
the corollary idea that "reflections on history are of no consequence on acting
historically."40 Whether epic or not, the cinematic representation of history under
digital conditions no longer has any constraints on its ability to make any place
or event from the past visually present on screen, through digital manipulation
of single shots or computer-generated sequences. But what this means is that
we more and more with rather than time, and we
identify past-ness "place" get
more and more used to experiencing a "virtual" sense of the past's presence in

representation. In the process, temporal experience itself is being divorced from

historical representation. To put it in rhetorical terms, in digitalized cinema,
enargeia has begun to be detached from both the historical and the historic, and
history is no longer made present, but made virtual.
It is therefore not surprising to find the staunchest resistance
to the encroaching
of the digital in documentary filmmaking, that is, on the end of the wide spectrum
of cinematic forms of historical representation furthest removed from the histori
cal epic. Threatened by the destabilization of the historically "real" initiated by
the virtually present, documentary filmmakers have shied away from utilizing
digital technology, and none more forcefully so than the undisputed master of
historical documentary art, Ken Burns.41 This is quite understandable if one
thinks of the "Ken Burns effect" as designed to highlight the very indexical qual
ity of photographs as fluid and "moving" windows onto the past. To reinforce the
message, in The Civil War Burns's camera stood still while supposedly captur
ing the places where historical battles and events had taken place, at the precise
time when they had taken place, thereby transforming history into photographic
landscape. Romantic and emotional, Burns's epic art initially refused the digital
in order to endow with "natural-ness" the indexicality of photographic reproduc
tion. It is therefore quite significant that in his last enterprise, The War, Burns

abandoned his stance against digitally restored and manipulated footage. Shed
none of its emotionalism and overly sanctimonious pretense to a "bottom
ding

up" historiographical approach, and still disdainful of the historical profession's

inability to capture "the experience" of World War II, The War allows "place"
to spell American-ness. Contrary to the claims of the filmmaker, The War is not
at all the story of four American towns during the war, but that of Everyman in

Everytown America. The vividness in the new picture is

of the Ken Burns effects
startling precisely because we were used to the patina of the old ones. And when,
at last, we see "red blood" in the footage?as Burns cues us to think in interview
after interview?then, and supposedly only then, we finally acknowledge that the
Good War was also a "bloody" conflict.
Quite possibly, with its forty million viewers, the most popular piece of histori
cal thinking inAmerican film to date, Burns's The War manages to be quite a bit
more and nationalistic" than any of his previous produc
"manipulative, nostalgic,
tions, but in one key respect it also provides the counterweight to the postmodern

40. Vivian Sobchack, "Introduction: History Happens," in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian
Sobchack (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 3.
41. Ricciardelli, "Visual Culture and the Crisis of History," 53.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 113

Forrest Gump.42 Cultural historian Paul Fussell, himself the author of the histori
cal bestseller The Great War and Modern Memory, appears repeatedly in the film
identified as "infantry." Similarly, the most authoritative and interesting figures
in the film, Samuel Hynes and Quentin Aanenson, are identified as "a fighter

pilot from Minneapolis" and "an Army pilot from Luverne." Coyly, Burns never
identifies them, respectively, as a distinguished Princeton literature professor, and
the author of an award-winning documentary on the Pacific theater of war. The
omission is telling because it points to the fact that Burns jettisoned on purpose
the authorial duetto of historians David McCullough and Shelby Foote, which had
worked so well in The Civil War, in order to offset the loss of indexical purity with
the appeal of unmediated "experience."43 On this score, Burns's turn to the digital
seeks to approach the encoding of history as experience that we have already
found in the digital archive and in the digitalization of the epic film.
At the same time, it confirms the gradual shift of cinematic experience toward
forms of immersive aimed at counteracting
environment the traditional identi
fication of the modern spectator with a disembodied gaze, that is, a "watcher"
separated from his or her body and the space of the representation by the dark
ness of the movie theater. The digitalization of spectacle in epic feature films and
documentaries is not an isolated or temporary phenomenon, but one confirmed by
the rising popularity of 3-D cinema, IMAX, and motion-simulation ride-films, all
made possible by digital technology. According to Lauren Rabinovitz, these post
modern forms of the "cinema of attractions" engage "multiple senses," thereby
defining the "cinematic experience not as a purely visual relationship to a screen
but as a pleasurable, physical self-awareness of coordinated perceptions within
an architectonic However not so much after
space."44 marginal?and anymore
the recent success of the 3-D version of Beowulf? digital spectacles and ride
films available in theme parks and theaters alike "attempt to affect and promise
embodiment as a prophylactic against a world of continuous disembodiment."45
In fact, the process has even reached as far as academia where "virtual
costly

reality historical re-creations," such as the Digital Roman Forum, are being pro
duced by the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (henceforth CVR Lab).46
The Forum is a 3-D reconstruction of the ancient Roman forum in 400 ce. that
can be accessed via or in the three-screen of the
computer "experienced" facility
CVR's Lab. Diane Favro, CVR Lab's founder and director, proudly defines the
Forum a "re-creation" as to the more term 'visual
opposed "scientific-sounding
ization'."47 The terminological distinction is appropriate precisely because Favro
sees the Forum as being in line with the "immersive simulations of ancient cit

42. Nancy Franklin, "In the Trenches: Ken Burns on the Second World War," The New Yorker
(September 24, 2007). http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2007/09/24/070924crte_
televisionjfranklin (accessed July 31, 2008).
43. Ibid.
44. Rabinovitz, "More than the Movies," 102.
45. Ibid., 104.
46. http://www.cvrlab.org/ (accessed July 31, 2008), now folded into the UCLA Experiential
Technology Center.
47. Diane Favro, "In the Eyes of the Beholder: Virtual Reality Re-creations and Academia,"
Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series Number 61 (2006), 323.

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 114 CLAUDIOFOGU

ies" created by the Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1890s.48 On the other hand,
she also insists on its scientific status by defining re-creation as "knowledge
representations" based on the conjectural paradigm of historiography associated
with the practices of microhistory.49 Both references, however, end up begging
the question of simulation.
Quite grand in scale and endowed with a system that reproduces and modulates
the sound of Latin speech, as one is "driven"50 around the Roman Forum, the
digital Forum lacks systematic means tomake a "rigorous and systematic distinc
tion between proofs and probabilities," which (in theory) constitute the epistemo
logical creed of microhistorians.51 It thus comes much closer to the epic scope
of Gladiator (2004) and the epistemological status of a "simulacrum"?in the
Baudrillardian sense of the word?than to the tale of Menocchio's adventures. In
fact, in order to re-create the architectural environment of classic Imperial Rome,
one of the sources of "knowledge" for the Forum is the famous "plastico" of

Imperial Rome commissioned in 1936 by Mussolini from the architect-archeolo

gist Italo Gismondi, which contained quite a number of "aggrandizing" elements,
and which has also inspired Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Gladiator, and another
virtual re-creation by the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) called
Rome Reborn.52 Undoubtedly, the Digital Roman Forum pushes the boundaries
of historical scholarship toward the pleasure of simulation and the embodiment of
presence through virtual reality scenarios. To judge its claims to scientific status
is not the aim of this discussion. Whatneeds underscoring is that like Burns's still
camera, the Forum pushes the boundary of digital technology toward its opposite,
the analogical, by projecting, for example, skyscapes at different times of day and
calling them "Lightscape study of shadows cast in the Roman Forum at 10:00
a.m. on June 21, a.d. 400."53 This is done, quite appropriately, for studying the

lighting inside and outside of buildings.54 But the "knowledge representation" of

a time and date derived from astronomical in fact, on
precise algorithms?when,
that specific day itmay have rained in Rome?throws us into a space of sensory
presence in which the disembodied voice of Cicero himself?as we approach the
southwest corner of the forum magnum?transports us away from representation
and delivers us to immersion.

Digital encodings of historical-ness in epic features and documentary film

making, 3-D motion-simulated ridefilms, auditory-stimulated virtual reality
reconstructions, and so on, all participate in fostering a shift from questions of
as the expe
representation to issues of sensory immersion that redefine history
rience of the virtually past. From the point of view of historical semantics, the

48. Ibid., 324.

49. Personal interview with Diane Favro on December 11, 2007.
50. A computer operator "drives" the simulation in the UCLA visualization lab.
51. Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory: Two or Three Things That IKnow about It," Critical Inquiry
20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993), 12.
52. http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/ (accessed July 31, 2008). The project was realized with
the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at Virginia Tech. See also http://www.com

mission5.isprs.org/3darch07/pdf/guidi_etal.pdf (accessed July 31, 2008).

53. Favro, "In the Eyes of the Beholder," 328.
54. Interview with Favro.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 115

digitalization of historical traces and representations seems to point in two new

directions: first, toward the visualization of history, and away from both the
transcendental and immanent conceptions of historical action, representation,
and consciousness that have characterized historic(al) the Western
imaginary
from the late eighteenth century onwards; second, toward a spatialization of his
torical experience, away from the temporal axis of narrative forms of historical
consciousness. These, then, are the two processes that we find operating in the
codification of history in video games.

IV. "REWRITEHISTORYWITH THE GREATESTGAME OF ALL TIME"

Returning to myinitial video-game fantasy, it should now be clear that its key
modality, that is, the availability of five options to anchor the player-avatar to his
torically documentable identity roles, relied on a notion of history untouched by
the virtualization and spatialization of historical experience instantiated by digital
technology. If Iwere to reinvent Holocaust II now, Iwould not hesitate to orga
nize it as a "strategy game" in which the objective would be to build and run an
extermination camp as efficiently as possible. Certainly this is a huge ethical step
back from the offering of five modalities connected to historical identities, but an
equally huge step forward toward the "greatest game of all time" and its promise
to "rewrite history," namely, Sid Meier's Civilization (henceforth SMC).
Thus boasts the official website for SMC, and, as far as "greatest game of
all time" is concerned, the description might be quite fitting.55 The exponential
distance between this video game and itsmost immediate rivals?except for The
Sims?in terms of sales, and makes it easy to point to
spin-offs, web-presence,
this product as the standard of "success" in the category of "Godlike" strategy
games.56 This is even more the case if one considers the number of public reviews
and academic analyses dedicated to it.Magazines as diverse as Time and Rolling
Stone, PC World, and GameSpot have repeatedly declared different editions of
SMC "Best Game of the Year."57 Few general treatises on video games omit a
detailed discussion of SMC, and at least one collection of essays and numerous

e-reviews and journal articles have already been dedicated to this game.58 Yet

55. http://www.Civ3.com (accessed July 31, 2008).

56. Godlike strategy games are games in which the player has to achieve a complex goal play
ing against the computer's artificial intelligence or other players seeking to achieve the same goal.
Besides its own four editions, SMC can be credited with being the direct
inspiration for a number
of strategy games, such as Alpha Centauri, Colonization, Civ City: Rome, Gettysburg!, Europa
Universalis, War of Empires, and the new hybrid Civilization IV: War of Empires.
57. On Amazon.com Civilization III has more than 500 customer reviews, with the first review
apparently read and rated by more than seven hundred people ("234 of 724 people found the following
review helpful," Amazon earnestly reports). http://www.amazon.com/Atari-04-22252-Civilization
3/dp/B00005JC8D/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid= 1210786306&sr=8-2 (accessed
July 31, 2008).
58. See, for example, Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 252-256, and Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on
Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 85-106. The collection of
essays has been published only in Italian by Matteo Bittanti with the title Civilization: Storie virtuali,
fantasie reali (Milan: Videoludica, 2005).

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 116 CLAUDIOFOGU

all the critical attention lavished on SMC is prompted less by its being the "Best
Game Ever" than by its claim to "rewrite" history.
Like many other games, SMC evolved from a board game of the same name,
and was inspired by strategy games such as Empire, Sim City, and Railway
Tycoon, and, since its creation in 1991, it has already gone through four expan
sions.59 Although expert players will make sophisticated distinctions among the
different editions?not always praising the latest?all of the game's versions
have maintained a certain "historical" character that has determined the game's
continuous appeal?in contrast, for example, to its much less successful spin-off

Alpha Centauri, which projects the history of human civilizations in future time
and space. In SMC the player chooses to act as the historical leader (Lincoln,
Chairman Mao, Cleopatra, Caesar, and so on) of one of eighteen historical "civi
lizations" (United States, Russia, Egypt, but also Iroquois and Maya), which he
or she must rival civilizations over a span. The rivals
develop against 6,000-year
are operated either by the computer's artificial intelligence or by other players in
the online version, and pursue the same or alternative of
strategies development.
To "develop," however, means a number of different things in SMC. In the first
place, itmay simply mean to withstand the passing of time, that is, the "6,000
years" the player has to win the game. Second, itmay mean to pursue one of a
number of options the player has to beat his opponents. It can mean to eliminate,
destroy, or conquer all rival civilizations, or to colonize and control a huge per
centage of world territory and population, or to develop through trading, diplo
matic, cultural, and military relations a hegemonic position over all rival civiliza
tions. It can also mean, to reach the highest score within a certain
quite simply,
time-frame decided with other players or the computer. Finally, it can even mean
being the first to complete a space ship to fly to Alpha Centauri?where suppos
edly one could continue playing the homonymous game created by Meier.
Whatever its creator meant, enthusiasts credit SMC with "rewriting" the very
notion of "history" according to postmodernist or poststructuralist principles
through the composite utilization of self-reflexivity, irony, creative anachronism,

counterfactuality, and so on.60 They praise its anthropological temporal sweep,

its emphasis on technology and culture, and, above all, the fact that playing SMC
amounts essentially to playing in "what if mode by constructing scenarios against
both historical reality (what historians say Lincoln did as President) and historical
plausibility (tanks may be attacked and even destroyed by Greek triremes). Pre
dictably, critics of SMC have pointed out that the game does not "rewrite" history
at all, because it negates it altogether. In other words, SMC does not measure up
to the definition of history it intends to rewrite, for it uses names and likenesses
of well known world leaders from the past, and invokes technological, political,
economic, and social realities, but does not combine them into something that one
could call a representation or interpretation of "what essentially happened" in the
And critics and enthusiasts alike seem to share some common terrain.
past. yet

59. Kacper Poblocki, "Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization,"
Focaal-European Journal of Anthropology 39 (2002), 164.
60. Matteo Bittanti, "L'utilita e il danno del videogame per la storia," in Storia e problemi con

temporanei 11 (2007), 16-32.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 117

The critical discourse around SMC stabilizes its referent, h/History, as either a
discourse anchoring representation to the real past that SMC supposedly does not
measure up to (critics), or as a transcendental Grand Narrative of mankind in time
waiting to be deconstructed by video games such as SMC (enthusiasts).
Both of these perspectives, however, end up downplaying an aspect of STVfC's
rewriting that pertains to the instability it introduces in the referent h/History.
From our SMCs success as can be ascertained in refer
perspective, history only
ence to the intersecting processes of digital remediation and resemanticization of
history, that is, in relation to other genres of historical simulation in this medium,
and to the virtualization and spatialization of history that we have observed at the
level of the digital archive and the remediation of cinematic representation. Let
me explain.
Let's start at the end and focus on the last escape
game's objective?the
to Alpha Centauri, which, besides alerting us to the intergaming literacy that
characterizes the activity of videogaming, also points to a key characteristic of
SMC. SMCs main claim to fame is its high number, and very complex system,
of variables, including personality traits attributed to past leaders (from which
a can choose). These variables characterize the economic and
player political

systems one can and combine, the cultural wonders and great scientists
develop
one can choose to pursue or emulate, which, as a whole, account for the sense

of non-linear, unlimited options (inexperienced) players have at their disposal.

One variable, however, remains linear and rigidly defined by the game design
ers: the technology tree that contains eighty technologies that players have at
their disposal for pursuing their chosen goals. In this key respect, critics rightly
charge that no matter
the playfulness and sense of freedom experienced by its
players, SMC contains an indisputable ideological kernel, which identifies it as a
quintessentially Western-American creation. It projects an image of the civilizing
process characterized by technological determinism and progress.61
Even withoutthis technological teleology, on several grounds SMC would
surely have raised all the political eyebrows it has in fact raised: for its politi
incorrect use of "barbarians" as a recurrent element
cally disturbing randomly

appearing in the game but never making it to the status of civilization;62 for its
identification of civilizations with national groups and states;63 for its imperialist
bias that makes it easier to win by conquering territory rather than developing
cultural wonders;64 or, more simply, for identifying liberalism with "giving every
civilization a chance to become the USA."65 In fact, unifying all of these ideologi
cal critiques is not technological determinism per se but the common refrain that

the game is structurally based on "anachronism" and is therefore quintessentially

"anti"-historical. In this way, charge its critics, SMC instantiates the pernicious

61. Poblocki, "Becoming-State," 165

62. Christopher Douglas, "Hai scatenato un'orda di barbari! Compattere indiani, giocare e definire

discipline," in Bittanti, ed.. Civilization, 40-64.

63. Poblocki, "Becoming-State," 167.
64. Barry Atkins, "La storia e un'assurdita: Civilization come esempio di barbarie storiografica,"
in Bittanti, ed., Civilization. 72.
65. Poblocki, "Becoming-State," 172.

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 118 CLAUDIO FOGU

effects of the postmodern critique of historical knowledge.66 Ironically, however,

these critics make their argument on the basis of a textualization of the game; that
is, they reify "play" into narrative, and criticize SMC as representation rather than
simulation, interactivity, and immersion.
In the first place, SMC is a masterful exercise in what Ian Bogost calls proce
dural rhetoric: the art of effective
persuasion and expression "through rule-based
representations rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or
and interactions
moving pictures."67 Game designers are "procedural authors" who create proce
dural models of external or imagined systems and impose sets of rules that create
particular possibility spaces for play. To play is to move in the space defined
by that set of rules, and in so doing the player creates a procedural rhetoric that
makes claims about the world. In this respect, SMC "represents history with
rules of interaction rather than patterns of writing" in ways entirely comparable
to both the anthropological scale and the "procedural history" offered by Jared
Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel,6S though, far more than in Diamond's book,
procedural history in SMC rotates around the space of possibility rather than
around the constraints of the conjunction of environmental, political, and social
factors that have determined it. Second, whatever the strategy, winning in SMC
is to learn the procedural code of the computer. The logic of the game therefore
always pushes the player toward the internal logarithm rather than the outside
referents itmobilizes. Real names of nations and world leaders, their images and
words, all serve to instantiate the "historical" as general referent in the game, but
not as something to be represented. Playing SMC is therefore much closer to act
ing in drama than narrating in literature or representing in painting.69 Above all,
gaming is a matter of role-playing, simulation, immersion, and interaction, not
representation. And it is on this score that SMC excels.
SMC's procedural rhetoric makes this game a quintessential "machine for
producing speculative and conditional" historical scenarios, which is precisely
how simulations are defined in video-game theory.70 Furthermore, its interac
tivity is guided by a mixture of the two modalities of pleasure associated with

videogaming: it is ludus insofar as the game is a win-or-lose proposition, but it

is also paideia insofar as the principal element of pleasure resides in its being a

strategy game that invites its player to multiply and test an n number of strate
gies for winning rather than seeking progression to a higher level of difficulty.
Finally, procedural and interactive elements of the game come together to give
SMC a very peculiar immersive quality. Continuous technological-aesthetic
developments?such as the new 3-D graphics of Civilization IV? have sought

66. Ibid., 171.

67. Bogost, Persuasive Games, ix.
68. Ibid., 125. References to Diamond's book as a model for SMC are ubiquitous in the favorable
literature. See, for example, Alex Burns, "Apprendimento ludico digitale e simulatzioni di macros
toria," in Bittanti, ed., Civilization, 157.
69. On the question of narrative and theater in video games, see Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the
Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), and Brenda
Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991).
70. William Uricchio, "Simulation, History, and Computer Games," in Handbook of Computer
Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 334.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 119

to augment SMC's realism in order to sustain the typical effect of immersion

that consists in "forgetting the medium" in all forms of representation, including
video games. In SMC, however, immersive realism is only secondary. The main
source of immersion in this game is the very confrontation between player and
computer's artificial intelligence, which hides a "deeper level of collaboration."71
The to learn the computer's procedural code makes the pleasure of
stimulus
gaming rest on how much
and how fast this learning becomes intuitive, smooth,
and rapid. One's pleasure depends on one's "becoming computer-like," melding
with it, and, as it were, "self-dissolving."72 This cyborgian image might be a bit
extreme, but it captures a trait common to all positive assessments of SMC as
history: SMC embodies a postmodern vision of history in its operation and play,
rather than in the texts or subtexts it produces, as its critics charge.
Rightly so, it is in the procedural rhetoric of the game thatWilliam Uricchio
finds a compendium of poststructuralist propositions, and Matt Bittanti an instan
tiation of both Hayden White's call for a modernist represen mode of historical
tation and Robert Rosenstone's list of postmodern historiographical practices.73
From a related perspective, Barry Atkins points out that SMC is a perfect example
of "creative anachronism" because itsmixing of temporal disjunction with histor
ical figures, buildings, and artifacts can be "perceived only insofar as the player
already knows the events associated with that historical figure."74 Finally, several
scholars have remarked on the perfect fit between SMC and the counterfactual or
"virtual" notion of historiographical practice advocated by Niall Ferguson and an
ever growing number of scholars.75 Like written experiments in virtual histori
ography, SMC is credited with dislodging history from its prolonged association
with determinism and with contributing to highlighting the role of contingency
at all levels of the historiographical operation. It should therefore not come as a

surprise that, in direct antithesis to ideological critiques, there are even those like
Kurt Squire who have strongly advocated (and implemented) the use of SMC for
didactic purposes.76
Each of
the scholars mentioned above has produced highly sophisticated
analyses of SMC, which would deserve a much more detailed discussion than I
can offer here. But although their case for SMC's status as an application of post
modern or poststructuralist principles is sound and convincing, their discussion
needs to be inserted into a wider consideration of the remediation processes that
characterize video games more than any other medium or Unlike
before after.
literature or cinema, video games were born from a pure act of remediation: the

71. Ted Friedman, "Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, and Space," in
Subjectivity,
Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM, ed. G. Smith (New York: New York
University Press, 2005). http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ.htm (accessed July 31, 2008), 12.
72. Ibid., 3.
73. Uricchio, "Simulation, History, and Computer Games," 332; Bittanti, "L'Uilita e il danno,"
6-12.
74. Atkins, "La storia e un'assurdita," 71 (my translation).
75. Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counter)"actuals Basic Books,
(London:
1996).
76. Kurt Squire, "Replaying History: Learning World Civilization III"
History through playing
(Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2004).

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 120 CLAUDIOFOGU

remediation of board games.77 More recently, however, the remediation process

has shifted to cinema. In the first more and more video games are
clearly place,

produced as spin-offs of successful movies. This is the case, for example, of Call
of Duty 2, Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, Battlefield 1942, all inspired by
Saving Private Ryan.7S Second, over the past two decades, advances in digital
technology have allowed better and better graphic interfaces to insert video-game
action in tridimensional environments. Cinema has been key to this process of
remediation, providing video-game designers with the language of point-of-view,
editing, shots, and sequences, which is now ubiquitous in the construction of
video-game simulations, and which is augmented by the insertion of pseudo or
real film clips inside video games. As we have seen, even SMC has benefited
from this process, with its third and fourth edition introducing visual elements
that have very favorably impressed its users. In fact, so-called history video
games as a whole have benefited most directly from this remediation of cinematic
conventions and have evolved into several subgenres.
least two significant subgenres that owe everything to remediation have
At
developed side by side with Godlike strategy games like SMC. On the one hand
are event-driven often?but not on con
strategy games always?based military
flicts. These rely on very detailed, documentary-based reconstructions of a his
toric event or site that is evoked, among other things, by the visual texture of the
game. Here, in games such as Napoleonic Computer Game Anthology, Battle of
the Bulge, Versailles 1685, orMaking History: The Calm and the Storm, the play
er is exposed primarily to the full pedagogical virtues of "virtual" history. Yet just
as in the September 11 Digital Archive, this process of virtualization deconstructs
the historic-ness of the events referred to, by insisting on the analogical appeal
of the historical simulation. Similarly, the whole genre of historical first-person
shooter games, inwhich the player acts through an avatar whose field of vision is
identified with the entire screen, has utilized cinematic remediation to disentangle
immersion from the effect of presence related to the act of witnessing.
enargeia,
This immersion in simulated historical action might suggest a strong intensifica
tion of presence, but all the evidence points to the contrary. The use of film clips
in all of these games to signal the "historical" status of the simulation that follows
contributes to a sharp separation rather than a merging of the two of them. This
phenomenon is particularly observable in highly politicized video games such as
the Italian // rosso e il nero (the red and the black) inwhich the player is invited to
choose either the identity of an antifascist partisan or that of a fascist fighter, and
to participate with other players online in a replay of the Italian civil war named
Resistance (1943-1945). Contrary to all expectations, many players engaged in
this game have declared that they have played in both modalities, thereby indi
cating that even in this case?as we have seen with SMC?identity is a function
of game-playing (not vice versa), and that the traditional idea of history in video

games is thoroughly de-referentialized and virtualized.79

77. Especially Dungeons & Dragons (1974).

78. Bittanti, "L'utilita e il danno," 43.
79. The same can be also said of "American" highly charged games such as JFK Reloaded, Waco
Resurrection, and 9111 Survivor.

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 DIGITALIZINGHISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS 121

It should be clear by now that SMC?like most other strategy games?is best
appreciated as a remediation of the Hollywood historic(al) epic. Like its model,
SMC speaks directly to the representation of history in consciousness, but unlike
the cinematic epic it does not do so through the excess of its representational
apparatus, or the extra-diegetic construction of the film as historic event. In
line with digital encroaching in the cinematic medium, SMC literally transforms
time into space. When you switch on a computer and install the game you are
transported into the familiar realm of a cinematic historical representation, which
includes an epic soundtrack midway between Gladiator and Chariots of Fire.
Your gaze, however, is identified with a bird flying over a non-time-specific sce
nario, which comprises an Assyrian-like temple in a Mayan-like city with New
York City and the Eiffel Tower in the background. This reference to a spatial
pastiche constitutes a clue to what follows. The game begins with a small illumi
nated area at the center of a dark screen. That is your territory; around you is only
darkness. Soon the game will bring you to establishing a settlement, which, by
a combination of luck and skill, will expand to thrive for 6,000 years?or perish
from trying. The narrative input to transform "place into space," as Ted Friedman
puts it, is therefore there from the beginning tomake sure the story of Civilization
is understood as a the "drama of a map in time."80
"spatial story," changing
In the video-game mode, gone are the historic event and the historic site.
epic
The digitalization of history in video games thus brings together spatialization,
virtualization, and simulation to the elimination of as
complete representation
the medium that anchored historical action to historical consciousness. Without
representation, the Aristotelian opposition between history and poetry comes to
a point of reversal. For Aristotle the former was inferior to the latter because it

only spoke of what had happened, rather than what may happen. Digital history
enters the twenty-first century exclusively under the sign of the possible; we are
now interested only in what may happen and are no longer concerned with what
has happened.

University of California,
Santa Barbara

80. Friedman, "Civilization and Its Discontents," 12.

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